


misery loves company

by ashesandhalefire



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 18:43:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhalefire/pseuds/ashesandhalefire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles' walk through the woods on the anniversary of his mother’s death is entirely intentional.</p><p>(In which Stiles goes looking for commiseration but instead continues to be a master of deflection.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	misery loves company

**Author's Note:**

> My second official foray into Teen Wolf fic, and obviously I decided to stick with the morbid.
> 
> Cross-posted from tumblr.

His walk through the woods on the anniversary of his mother’s death is entirely intentional. 

When Scott asks him later why he smells like rotting wood and mold and de—he’ll avoid saying death, won’t say death, will break off in the middle of the word and restart with a sort of twinge in his voice that Stiles has grown to hate hearing—Derek, he’ll say it was an accident, that he was wandering and thinking and just ended up at the Hale house.

When his father asks him about the dirt and leaves on his jeans and the tears in what was never one of his favorite shirts anyway, Stiles will say he hadn't meant to trespass— hadn't meant to stumble inside, hadn't meant to see the ex-felon, hadn't meant to do something so stupid—and he’ll go upstairs to shower and change.

Stiles is a better liar than he gets credit for.

His father likes to drink, likes to take the pain away with a crystal glass and a burning in his throat, but Stiles likes—that’s the wrong word, it’s always the wrong word, will never be the right word—needs to feel it. 

Forgetting upsets his stomach—guilt makes him nauseous, he needs the almost-but-not-quite numbness and the tingling agony—but remembering also makes him dizzy. It’s why he stumbles through the forest, up and down the hills, catching his clothes on rough tree trunks and stray branches that reach out and grip the fabric.

By the time he makes his way to the clearing where the house looms like a broken beast in its final resting place, he has a few small cuts on his palms—dwarfed, shamed by the scars on his insides that nobody ever sees—that he can’t be bothered wincing over. 

He kicks at the dirt and stares at Derek’s childhood home.

“Shouldn't you be in school?”

“No.”

Derek lingers at the tree line, hands in his pockets—Stiles bets that he knows, bets he’s heard it around town or figured it out for himself—and stares. His steps forward are slow—not tentative, not cautious, just lazy—and Stiles thinks about the year he went to school instead of staying home. 

When people know, and everyone in Beacon Hills knows about the sheriff and his wife and their hyperactive son, they stay away long enough to make it clear they remember—nobody wants to talk about it anymore, it’s too long ago, beyond the point of passing condolences—and then try to pretend like they've paid their dues or filled their quota of respect and can act like everything is normal and everything is okay. Stiles appreciates being left on his own—without the sentimentalities that require him to say things like “thank you” and “I’m fine” on the day that he lost his mother.

He prefers the silence of solitary mourning. But then again Stiles knows and is standing resolutely at the center of Derek’s pain, so it only makes sense for Derek to be here and for Stiles not to mind—to have sought him out, to have come to the woods for the sole purpose of finding Derek Hale and tearing open their scars. 

When he looks back later, he’ll admit that Derek was always his only real option—like he’s had so many before, like he hasn't made do for years without him. 

Scott is his best friend—he tries to understand, tries to empathize, to compare their largely-single-parent upbringings, and Stiles loves him even if there’s always a disconnect—but the fundamental problem is that Scott’s world is full of potential. So Stiles allows himself one day a year to forget that Scott is his brother, one day to hate someone he would give his life for in an instant for something that isn't even his fault. 

Stiles gives himself twenty four hours to be bitter over the simple fact that Scott’s father could come back.

Maybe Scott doesn't want his dad to come back and maybe Scott’s dad was an asshole that made things worse when he was around and maybe Scott’s dad is a dick who doesn't deserve to have people like Scott or Melissa in his life, but Scott’s dad is still Scott’s dad and there will always be the possibility that he could come back and things could be different, and Stiles isn't that lucky. Neither is Derek.

Derek has been six feet of poorly-hidden and irreversible emotional damage since the very beginning—Stiles can only guess as to how many times Derek runs out into the forest until his legs give out and there’s nobody around to see him cry, to hear him scream and mourn his losses—and Stiles feels confident that Derek is the one that needs to hear his questions.

“How do you do it?” he asks, a frown creeping onto his face as Derek pauses by his side. “How do you live with this house?”

Derek shrugs.

“It’s sick. It’s really sick.”

Derek—somehow listening to and ignoring Stiles all at the same time, hearing words he’s probably already said to himself, lectures that are probably part of his daily mantra—nods.

“I don’t even have pictures, and you have a whole burnt-down house with rooms and smells and memories. It’s sick.”

He climbs the front steps without waiting for an answer, and Derek follows, crunching over the lawn. The concrete crumbles beneath his feet, breaking off into pieces, and Stiles stares up at the exposed beams of the porch roof.

“This place is falling apart. How has the town not condemned it yet?”

“It gets worse,” Derek offers, and Stiles isn't proud of how easily his interest is piqued. 

—

The last thing he expects from Derek is a guided tour of the house, but it’s exactly what he gets.

He starts with the upstairs—rotting floors and charred wall studs, a few windows that survived to let an eerie blue glow cover the whole place—and the fact that half of it doesn't exist anymore should probably make it boring or creepy or nauseating, but Derek doesn't see what Stiles sees. He runs his hands over the walls in a quiet consideration that makes Stiles want to pay painfully close attention. 

Derek sees rooms and hallways where fire has eaten away the sheetrock and doorjambs—master bedroom here at the front of the house, guest bathroom there between those two beams, his own room in the back corner where Stiles can look down into the remains of the kitchen, a gaping hole in the house with nothing left to show of its last remaining survivor—and Stiles commits it all to memory.

Stories get slipped in—Derek probably doesn't realize what he’s doing, eyes glassy, voice shaking, mind going far away—about parts of the house, and Stiles thinks about Derek before the fire. Derek played Uno on the window seat in the living room with his cousins when it was raining too hard to go outside. Derek spent a whole summer smiling obnoxiously after Laura fell up the stairs in the foyer and chipped her front tooth. Derek used to hide candy in between the towels in the hall closet after Halloween because his mom always went on diets in November to try to get skinny before the winter holidays.

Stiles figures he probably liked to laugh a lot—parts of his family sound familiar in the memories, sound like stories the sheriff would tell about Stiles, sound like Derek was surrounded by some of the greatest people Stiles will never get to meet—and bets Derek has a nice smile. People who like to laugh—in his experience, like his mother—have nice smiles.

He wonders if that’s why Derek doesn't like him very much most of the time—too close to everything he’s lost, too quick to the foreign tongues of sarcasm and humor that Derek doesn't know how to translate into guilt and sorrow—and hopes Derek might learn to smile again one day.

Following Derek through the house, Stiles watches him pause only once.

“Don’t,” he says, eyeing the basement door. The point of coming to Derek and picking at scabs was bloodletting, not bleeding out, and the Hale house basement is too big. ”I— I read the report.”

“I figured.”

Stiles grabs at the back of his shirt and pulls. Derek doesn't see the house the same way he does—Derek won’t see charred cinder block and barred windows or hear creaks, he’ll see bodies and blood and hear screams.

“They died down there,” Derek says, face dark and twisted as he runs his palm over the splintering wood of the molding, and there’s guilt that tastes familiar when Stiles breathes it in. “All of them.”

—

They stretch out on the bare expanse of grass that was once the backyard, and Stiles finds it in himself to lie still. Derek is close enough to touch, to reach out and wrap nimble fingers around the curve of his wrist, and Stiles allows himself one small, anxious shift of his hips as Derek moves a hand to rest behind his head.

The forest is eerily quiet, and Stiles chances a glance to the side. Derek stares up at the tangle of tree tops with a tightly pulled mouth and sorrowful eyes. Stiles thinks of coming home to the silence of an empty house, and wonders if the whole world doesn't seem empty to Derek now.

“Why did you show me that?”

He has other questions—ones that he thinks pick more at Derek’s heart than his brain, at his own soul than at anything else—but he wouldn't mind an answer to the one that slips out. Derek shakes his head slightly, blinking twice before he answers.

“You don’t talk about your mother very often.”

Stiles counters, “You don’t talk about your family ever.”

“You seemed like you were upset.” Derek speaks slowly, the words dragging from his lips like he’s in no rush—to have or to finish the conversation Stiles isn't sure, doesn't care, because he just wants the sounds—and then he lapses back into silence.

“…And?”

Derek snaps a twig between his fingers. “Misery loves company.”

“You've got plenty to share, huh.”

“I could stand to spare a little.”

Stiles reconsiders reaching for his wrist—fingerprint to pulse, identity to existence—and then hesitates at the intimacy. Derek is good at drawing lines in the sand, and Stiles knows that there are some that can’t be uncrossed, but the wind is heavy and the lines are blurring and Stiles can’t seem to stop moving forward.

“Why the sudden attack of sympathy?”

He settles for words because he’s good with them—Derek isn't, doesn't bother trying, still sometimes seems like the few he does manage actually say more than a hundred of Stiles’. Derek is better at speaking silently—curling his mouth into a snarl, furrowing his eyebrows in judgment, narrowing his eyes as a threat—and Stiles does his best to keep up. It’s a language he usually speaks fluently, the subtle nuances of a twitching lip or a wide eye, but Derek’s dialect is different, more personal, warped by trauma, and Stiles sometimes has to fight with it.

“You keep it inside and you end up like me,” Derek finally says, shaking his head like his life is a cautionary tale—don’t fall in love, don’t trust anyone, don’t believe you aren't already beaten—and Stiles watches him plant his feet firmly against the ground, knees arched off the lawn. “You shouldn't end up like me.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

He supposes on another day he’d be excited to hear Derek laugh—a sarcastic, biting chuckle is what it really is, but they all come from the same place really, and Stiles ought to know. “What isn't?”

Stiles knows how his brain works—it already has a list going: heroic, resilient, fast-healing, perfect teeth—but he clamps his lips together and refuses to say anything. Derek doesn't want his pity just like Stiles doesn't want Derek’s, and it all sounds like pity after walking through the Hale house and hearing the stories.

“How did she die?”

Stiles expects the question—always anticipates it, files away variations of it’s complicated and the doctors said and fuck you to offer up as explanation—because he’s been asked before, and he gives Derek the answer that stops everyone else.

“Slowly.”

But Derek is Derek and he isn't afraid to push back in places where Stiles didn't know he could be pushed—where it hurts like a bitch and makes him want to cry, where the relief of the stretch in his muscles is so overwhelming that it makes his whole body go slack—and he talks.

For every part of the house that Derek touched, he is rewarded with a story—the hospital, the chemo, the homecare, the hospital again, hospice, the way it rained the day before her funeral and the day after her funeral but not the day of her funeral—and Stiles feels weight lifting off his chest. 

It mostly seems like he’s talking to the leaves—like the clouds are listening to the stories of how his mom wore a Robin bandana to match his Batman, how she used to pretend to eat macaroni and cheese with him even after she lost her appetite entirely—and Derek just happens to be there, happens to know when to sit up and sprinkle torn blades of grass across the lawn for Stiles to watch, happens to know that Stiles needs him to be quiet.

It doesn't feel like he’s doing anything special until Stiles is sitting and looking into Derek’s eyes, leaning back and telling stories he hasn't thought about in years, and Derek is listening. A knot in Stiles’ stomach loosens, and his secrets spill.

When he looks back on it later, Stiles will only really remember that it felt good—the pressure being relieved, bubbling out past his lips in a way that he never allows, a way he intentionally avoids—to say it out loud. He’ll remember the look on Derek’s face too, not that he’ll ever admit it, because he’ll file it away in the back of his mind and keep it as a reminder for those days when Derek is vicious and feral and Stiles almost hates him because he doesn't know why.

“I got in the way a lot,” he says, and Derek is careful not to break eye contact as Stiles shifts forward. “I would forget to take my meds and be all over the place, and I just…” He shrugs lamely and stretches for the patch in the lawn that Derek has been tearing at, his fingers slipping easily between the blades of grass as he uproots them. “You know me. I’m a handful now. Imagine me back then, off my medication. I’m what the professionals considered a stressor.”

Derek reaches down into the grass—their fingers touch, a light brush, knuckles sliding together until they match up, and Stiles’ whole body goes hot. He swallows.

“It was the disease in the end,” he concedes, and Derek’s fingertips are callous on the underside of his wrists. “The disease was what stopped her heart. But I didn't help.”

“Family always helps,” Derek says firmly, and Stiles senses that there isn't room for argument. 

When he pulls the box from the back of his closet later and puts a picture frame on the edge of his bookshelf, Stiles will pretend like it’s been there all along—like he never hid from her, never tried to forget, never needed someone else’s pain to eclipse his for a while before he could look her in the eyes and let his heart hurt again.

Derek’s pain is massive and all-consuming and it burns at the edges of everything he does. It colors all of his words and it dictates his every action, and Stiles sees it eating away at him even as he stretches out in the afternoon sun. Derek’s outsides are manicured—perfected isn't a stretch because his jaw is chiseled, his eyes sharp, his teeth straight, his arms defined, his stomach tight, his legs strong—but his insides are marred and bruised with everything he keeps to himself, and Stiles wonders how nobody sees it.

Derek hates himself enough to fix the outside and leave the inside broken and torn—to drive a shiny Camaro and live in the crumbling shell of his family home, to own a leather jacket and wear the same pair of ratty sneakers every day—and Stiles doesn't want to live like that, pushing people away because he feels like a burden, because he thinks he doesn't deserve to be happy. 

He wants to look at his mother’s face and smile and think about anything she did that ever made him laugh. He wants to let the pain out when it wells up and remember the way she used to hug him from behind and kiss him on the ear.

Derek—for all his growling, his trust issues, his short temper—is a good person, and Stiles lets out a soft laugh when he realizes why Derek bothered to entertain his presence. The cracks are starting to show on Stiles’ outside—the insincerity in his smile, the sarcasm on his tongue—and Derek recognizes the telltale signs. He sees someone bottling up and knows how to break the seal—maybe, like Stiles, he’s better at deflecting, better at handling other people first, better at teaching than doing.

“Talking…,” he says when Derek raises an eyebrow. “It helps. When someone”—who knows, who understands—“is listening, anyway.”

Derek nods. “You keep it inside, and it festers. Gets bigger and nastier. Vicious.”

“Eats you alive,” Stiles offers. “Cripples you.”

“Yeah.”

Stiles flops back with a grunt and turns—Derek lays back much more gracefully, splaying out on the lawn so close that Stiles can feel the grass shifting under the pressure of his jacket—to find himself being looked at. It’s something Derek is good at—looking at Stiles, watching him, drinking him in—and Stiles licks his lips, whole body shaking as he struggles to take even breaths.

“I love cemeteries.”

Derek exhales shortly. “People can’t forget there.”

“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth quirks up like the ghost of a smile, and Derek seems to welcome it.

—

Derek uses the excuse of the setting sun to walk him back through the forest, and Stiles doesn't trip. His legs are shaky—practically buckling, nervous under the new weight of their shared secrets—but he manages to stay solidly on his feet until his hand touches the hood of his car. He digs for his keys in his pocket while Derek watches and doesn't say anything— doesn't have anything to say, can’t put words together in any way that means something appropriate, hates that he leaves with an awkward twitch of his shoulders—and climbs inside the Jeep with a huff.

He stares through his windshield at Derek for too long—knuckles white on the steering wheel, foot tapping nervously at the accelerator even as the keys sit uselessly on the set beside him, but Derek stares right back at him—and then Stiles shoves his way back outside, fingers slipping against the door handle and sneakers sliding on the leaves.

Derek is an asshole—rude and demanding and overly aggressive and terrible at making small talk—but Derek is also broken in ways that make him think he doesn't know the half of it, and he’s still always saving Stiles.

When he thinks back on it later, he won’t put it in any specific terms, won’t put it into one of the boxes he usually uses to sort out his life—mostly because it won’t fit. He’ll just remember it—palms on his face, breath on his cheek, words in his ears, “breathe, breathe”—and touch his fingers to his mouth and wonder. 

His heartbeat is frantic, beating desperately against his ribs as he lays on his bed with a picture from his fifth birthday cuddled to his chest, and Stiles will wonder if it makes Derek’s world a little less quiet.

—

“You’re a little too good at hiding from it,” his dad will grunt in the morning, scooping the picture off the rug and staring at it as he tries to rub the hangover from his eyes, and it’s not really fair—they both hide from it, both run from it, both wake up some mornings and think maybe it was just a bad dream.

“Yeah,” Stiles will say, taking the picture back and setting it on top of his dresser. “But I’m getting better.”


End file.
